As the Bush administration kicks its media campaign into high
gear for war, one of the emerging themes is that the war will be "for democracy
in Iraq." The "democracy pitch" will be especially important in the absence of
any hard evidence that Saddam Hussein actually has and intends to use weapons of
mass destruction. On July 17 U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz
spoke to reporters about "a democratic Iraq, and that is our goal." On August 11
the BBC headlined, "U.S. 'wants democracy in Iraq.'" On September 27 the Inter
Press Service reported: "Just last week, Bush's national security adviser,
Condoleezza Rice, told the Financial Times that the U.S. military should be seen
as 'liberators' when it moves on Iraq, and that the administration was devoted
to 'democratization, or the march of freedom in the Muslim world.' Vice
President Dick Cheney has said much the same thing in recent weeks."

The rhetoric about waging a war to make Iraq a democracy is a smokescreen to
hide the fact that we don't have a democracy here in our own country. A real war
for democracy in Iraq is the last thing the War Party wants.

DEMOCRACY IN THE U.S.?

Excuse me for bringing the subject down to earth so
graphically, but wouldn't we all agree that in a real democracy people not only
have the right to vote, but even more importantly they have the right to go to
the bathroom? But by that very modest standard, the U.S. is a collection of
corporate feudal tyrannies.

Corey Robin writes in the Boston Globe [9/29/02] "In 1995... female employees at
a Nabisco plant in Oxnard, California, maker of A-1 steak sauce and the world's
supplier of Grey Poupon mustard, complained in a lawsuit that line supervisors
had consistently prevented them from going to the bathroom. Instructed to
urinate into their clothes or face three days' suspension for unauthorized
expeditions to the toilet, the workers opted for adult diapers. But incontinence
pads were expensive, so many employees downgraded to Kotex and toilet paper,
which pose sever health risks when soaked in urine. Indeed, several workers
eventually contracted bladder and urinary tract infections. Hearing of their
plight, conservative commentator R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. advised the workers to
wear special diapers used by horses in New York’s Central Park carriage
trade....According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 1979, 25 percent of
employees in medium- to large-sized companies did not have paid rest breaks
during which they could go to the bathroom. By 1993, the last year for which
there are statistics, that number had jumped to 32 percent."

Of course our right to go to the bathroom isn’t the only democratic right that
corporate CEO dictators trample on routinely. Freedom of speech and assembly do
not prevail inside America's corporate fiefdoms. Robin notes that, "Exxon Mobil
and Delta have installed software programs on their company computers to ferret
out any sign of employee opposition to management authority. The program
forwards to managers all employee documents and e-mails –– saved or unsaved,
sent or unsent –– containing "alert" words like "boss" or "union." As a
supervisor explained to the Wall Street Journal, "'The workplace is never free
of fear –– and it shouldn’t be. Indeed, fear can be a powerful management
tool'...In the last decade alone, according to federal government statistics,
almost 200,000 employees [were] punished for exercising their right to form and
participate in a union."

REGIME CHANGE DESPERATELY NEEDED

To suggest that the U.S. government is waging a war for democracy in Iraq is
absurd, because our U.S. rulers are the enemies of democracy. George Bush and
Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and all the others who control the
U.S. government say they are for democracy, but in fact they are for absolutely
undemocratic corporate control of workers, which is what capitalism is all
about.

President Bush's war on Iraq has nothing to do with democracy except to prevent
it, here and in Iraq. The U.S. government supported Saddam Hussein and gave him
biological weapons of mass destruction in the 1980's when he was just as much a
dictator as now: democracy had nothing to do with it. Just as "fear can be a
powerful management tool" at the workplace, fear is also a powerful way to
control whole populations, especially the fear- mongering that President Bush is
using to beat the drums of war on Iraq.

War is the great pretext that corporate leaders like Cheney (former CEO of
Haliburton Oil) and Rumsfeld (former CEO of GD Searle) use to demand greater
sacrifice and obedience from working people in the name of "patriotism." Our
leaders are no more trying to protect us from harm than Nabisco, Exxon and Delta
CEOs are trying to protect democratic freedoms for us on the job.

Bush and company want wars to kill innocent people abroad in the name of the
American people because they hope this will destroy international solidarity
between American and foreign working people and make us all easier to control.

The most effective way we can help bring democracy to Iraq is to fight for it
here in the U.S.